Union University News

JACKSON, Tenn. – Jan. 16, 2013 – Students at Union University become intimately familiar with the university’s four core values during their college years: excellence-driven, Christ-centered, people-focused, future-directed.

But students in the nurse practitioner program who graduated in December finished their education at Union with a special look at what the core values mean.

Kelly Harden, associate professor of nursing, and Patsy Crihfield, professor of nursing, assigned the students in their primary care class a final project to demonstrate the meaning of those core values and how they would use them in their practice after graduation.

“We wanted these graduate students to do something creative that showcased the Union core values that are such a part of their education,” Harden said. “We really did not know what to expect and were astounded by what they did.”

Working in groups of four or five, the students produced a variety of projects, including mosaics, videos, digital scrapbooks, poems and other creative displays.
James “Bubba” Tetleton, of Ripley, Tenn., worked in a group that created a mosaic, with various photos representing the core values. On the mosaic, the core values appear at the bottom of the picture, with a picture of Miller Tower at the top.

“Union is successful and their students are successful because of these core values,” Tetleton said. “These core values, therefore, are at the bottom of this holding up Union.”

Tetleton said the project served as an appropriate conclusion to the group’s education at Union and left them thinking about the core values that had guided their studies.

Tracie Woodward, of Dyersburg, helped her group produce a video with a slideshow of photos from a mission trip and other projects the group members did throughout their time at Union. Group members took one core value and explained what it meant to them in the video. The presentation ended with a poem that Woodward wrote tying the core values together.

“To be able to go to a school that puts God before everything else, and to be able to incorporate that in everything we did – you pray before class, you pray before clinical, you pray with your patients – everything about it is all God-centered,” Woodward said. “For us to be able to bring that together and do a final project to get a grade on, I cried through the whole project.”